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Sermons at St. John’s Presbyterian Church Uncertainty
Space Transcribed from the sermon preached April 27, 2008 The Reverend Max Lynn,
Pastor St. John’s Presbyterian Church 2727 College Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94705 Telephone 510-845-6830 Fax 510-845-6837 office@stjohns.presbychurch.net http://www.stjohns.presbychurch.net In
an article entitled "Scamming Environmental Policy" in the May 2008
issue of Worldwatch Magazine, Freudenburg, Gramling and Davidson report on what
they humorously give the acronym SCAM – Scientific Certainty Argumentation
Method. “On December 21, 2004 a federal task
force issued its final report on proposals to allow U.S. citizens to import
prescription drugs from Canada. Because
the task force “could not be sure” that the imported drugs would be safe, its members
recommended that the practice remain illegal. “The next day, a different federal
agency, the forest service, decided it could not be sure that logging would be
bad for the environment. It therefore
eliminated the requirements for preparing environmental impact statements in
Forest Plans and for protecting “viable” species from destruction through
logging. “These back to back announcements
illustrate the importance of an often-overlooked fact: many scientific agency
decisions are made on the basis not of solid scientific findings but of
pervasive scientific uncertainty…Despite many calls for more science, the key
factor influencing outcomes often has to do with what an agency decides when
there is no real way to know whether something is truly safe or not. “This uncertainty space” creates rich
opportunities for gaming the system. If
organized industrial interests can slow the regulatory machinery until
“scientific answers” become definitive, then action may be thwarted for decades
– even in the face of what can eventually become overwhelming scientific
evidence.” The Worldwatch crew calls
this strategy the “Scientific Certainty Argumentation Method” – SCAM for short.
(Freudenburg, William. Robert Gramling, and Debra Davidson. Scamming Environmental Policy. World Watch.
May/June 2008. p. 7f) As other blatant examples of SCAM they site the cases of
tobacco as a cancer causing agent and human impact on global warming. Ironically Fundamentalist Christians use the same argument
against Evolution and in favor of teaching Creationism in public schools. But back to science.
Underlying the SCAM strategy of industry scientists, lawyers and
politicians is what Wendell Berry calls “industrial fundamentalism;” or the
idolization of the limitless human being.
In the May 2008 Harper’s, in an article entitled “Faustian Economics”
Berry says that these “Strategies of delay, so far have been a sort of willed
oblivion, or visions of large profits to the manufacturers of such ‘biofuels’
as ethanol from corn or switch grass, or the familiar unscientific faith that
‘science will find an answer.’ The
dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call the American
Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible.
We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at
any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves. “The problem with us,” continues Berry, is not only
prodigal extravagance but also an assumed limitlessness. We have obscured the issue by refusing to
see that limitlessness is a godly trait. “There is now a growing perception and not just among a few
experts, that we are entering a time of inescapable limits. We are not likely to be granted another
world to plunder in compensation for our pillage of this one.” Berry then uses Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor
Faustus and Milton’s Paradise Lost to tease out the idea that one of
the defining features of Hell is that it has no limits. Then he continues, “I am well aware of what
I risk in bringing this language of religion into what is normally a scientific
discussion. I do so because I doubt we
can define our present problems adequately, let alone solve them, without some
recourse to our cultural heritage. We
are after all trying to deal with the failure of scientists, technicians, and
politicians to ‘think up’: a version of human continuance that is economically
probable and ecologically responsible, or perhaps even imaginable…If we go back
to our tradition we are going to find a concern with religion, which at a minimum
shatters the selfish context of the individual life, and thus forces a
consideration of what human being are and ought to be.” “This concern persists at least as late as our Declaration
of Independence, which holds as ‘self evident, that all men are created equal;
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights…’ Thus
among our political roots we have still our old preoccupation with our
definition as humans, which in the Declaration is wisely assigned to our
Creator; our rights and the rights of all humans are not granted by any human
government but are innate, belonging to us by birth. This insistence comes not from the fear of death or even
extinction but from the ancient fear that in order to survive we might become
inhuman or monstrous.” (Berry, Wendell.
Faustian Economics. Harper’s. May 2008. p.35f) It is tempting to try and slip God into the uncertainty of
science, to say that God is the knowledge or truth unknown-- like the Athenians
who put up a statue, just in case they missed one, to the “Unknown God.” This is the stopgap God. But giving God credit for those things we do
not know though science gives us a shrinking God. But I do think it is important to recognize that even if we say
we do not believe in God, we still have faith in something. And for most of us (even many of us
Americans who say we do believe in God) it is the human ability to live beyond
limits, to find a new technological fix for any problem we may encounter. Upon beginning his ministry Jesus meets the devil in the
wilderness and, like Adam and Eve in the Garden, is tempted by the devil to
become limitless. It might be the
enlightened industrialist in me, or is it the socialist humanist, but I must
say that I have been frequently troubled with his choices, with his choice to
remain human and limited, to not take on human problems from a macro
level. What is a healing for one woman,
a meal for a few thousand in a world of sickness and starvation? What is so divine about that? And certainly much of ancient Israel and most people of
history have waited and called forth powerful messiahs, emperors, warrior
chiefs, magicians, people of mythic proportions who could lift us and our world
beyond our human limitations. Certainly
part of our reluctance to be critical and make adjustments comes from our fear
that Atlas may shrug, for we have indeed benefited from brilliant minds of
business and science. But Jesus doesn’t
give into the devils temptation because, unlike Adam and Eve, unlike us, he
doesn’t confuse limits with confinement.
Berry points out, “Satan’s fault, as Milton understood it and perhaps
with some sympathy, was precisely that he could not tolerate his proper
limitation; he could not subordinate himself to anything whatever.” It is not unusual to find critics who regard
Satan and Faustus' defiance as salutary and heroic. “On the contrary, our human and earthly limits, properly
understood, are not confinements but rather inducements to formal elaboration
and elegance, to fullness of relationship and meaning.” And here I think is Berry’s strongest point,
“Perhaps our most serious cultural loss in recent centuries is the knowledge
that some things, though limited, are inexhaustible. For example, an ecosystem, even that of a working forest or farm,
so long as it remains ecologically intact, is inexhaustible. A small place…can provide opportunities of
work and learning, and a fund of beauty, solace, and pleasure – in addition to
its difficulties – that cannot be exhausted in a lifetime or in generations.” “…We must learn again to ask how we can make the most of
what we are, what we have, what we have been given. If we always have a theoretically better substitute available
from somebody or someplace else, we will never make the most of anything.” In rejecting the devil in the wilderness, in his life,
death, and resurrection, Jesus communicates body and soul that though there are
limits to our human being, though we lack full knowledge and power, though we
are fallible and finite, there is divine beauty in who we are as humans, in who
we are created to be. And this beauty
is inexhaustible, eternal. Here I call it beauty, but we could just as well call it
love or peace, and I suppose each encompasses the other, or perhaps, this
divinity within our humanity just can’t quite be captured with words or any
other symbols or measurements. And this is why I doubt the significance of attempts by
science to measure faith, religion or God.
Not that I am against trying. I
am fascinated by the study to find the faith gene, or the study of the parts of
the brain where faith originates, or the chemical reactions that take place in
religious thought and actions. No doubt some will want to argue that we only have faith in
God, that God only exists because of a certain chemical or gene, and therefore
God is the product of the evolution of human DNA and the brain. But we already know this is true, or we can
postulate that it is true. But just because we developed to see truth in a certain way
doesn’t mean our way of seeing is not true.
As Christians we would say that this was precisely God’s plan for our
evolution. The Spirit of God, the
Spirit of love, peace and beauty draws us toward itself. We can even say that both the ability of
humans to know and live within our limits as humans, yet in this very process
to expand creatively and spiritually to unite with other beings, with life
itself, has enabled the kind of cooperation and community which has furthered
the evolution of the human brain. In
other words, our ability to know and understand, to perform scientific
experiments, is a gift from God. In Her
we live and move and have our being. Furthermore, to know what region of the brain or what
chemical helps create an artist doesn’t explain her art, or why the same gene
or chemical in another person will result in another piece of art, both
particular and defined by its own set of limitations, yet just as inexhaustible
in its beauty. Berry again: “In science one experiment, whether it succeeds
or fails, is logically followed by another in a theoretically infinite
progression. According to the underlying myth of modern science, this
progression is always replacing the smaller knowledge of the past with the
larger knowledge of the present, which will be replaced by the yet larger
knowledge of the future…Given the methodologies of science, the law of gravity
and the genome were bound to be discovered by somebody; the identity of the
discoverer is incidental to the fact.
But it appears that in art there are no second chances. We must assume that we had one chance each
for the Divine Comedy and King Lear. If
Dante and Shakespeare had died before they wrote those poems, nobody ever would
have written them. If Jesus had not remained in his particular body within his
own limits as a human, to sacrifice power for love, gaming the legal system for
deciding with the Spirit of truth, judgment for grace, violence for peace, the
cross for eternal life, then we would not have the Gospel. In the Gospel we see that
self-aggrandizement brings loneliness and the limitation of never being
satisfied. And in some mysterious,
immeasurable way, humility unites us with the power of the universe,
self-sacrifice for goodness and truth brings freedom, and love brings victory. The Gospel tells us that you and I were
created special, unique, beautiful. Our
very life is ours to dance and paint.
And yet, while still we are limited and finite, fallible and sinful,
even though we must make decisions with less than perfect knowledge, by God’s
grace, we are called not to game the system, nor even to repaint the life of
Jesus, but to paint our life as if the risen Christ, the Spirit of Truth, were
in us dancing and painting. Jesus, a person
of such integrity, who remained within his own human limits yet loved with an
inexhaustible love, crucified after a short life, is living still. I
hope you are beginning to see, that this God of whom I speak is not the God of
the gaps in human knowledge, not a God to be pushed away from science,
economics and politics into the church and bedroom alone, not just a statue to
an unknown God that we play like the lottery or the horoscopes just in case,
but the One Creator of all life, who does not fear nor shrink from growing
knowledge, but rejoices when knowledge is used for beauty, love and the
evolution of the life community.
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